{"id":129976,"date":"2018-10-22T11:00:43","date_gmt":"2018-10-22T15:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129976"},"modified":"2018-10-22T15:18:57","modified_gmt":"2018-10-22T19:18:57","slug":"becoming-radicalized-an-interview-with-john-wray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/22\/becoming-radicalized-an-interview-with-john-wray\/","title":{"rendered":"Becoming Radicalized: An Interview with John Wray"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Valeria Luiselli (left) and John Wray (right)<\/p><\/div>\n

John Wray seems restless under the confines of any single identity. He writes fiction in English and German, carries both a United States and an Austrian passport, and works under a pseudonym.\u00a0<\/em>The Right Hand of Sleep, which won Wray a Whiting Award, is an austere political thriller;\u00a0<\/em>Canaan\u2019s Tongue\u00a0is a supernatural Southern gothic; and\u00a0<\/em>Lowboy, his 2009 breakthrough, narrates one day in the life of a schizophrenic teenager roaming the subway tunnels beneath New York City. \u201cThese days, writers have brands,\u201d wrote Carolyn Kellogg in the <\/em>Los Angeles Times when Wray\u2019s fourth novel,\u00a0<\/em>The Lost Time Accidents,\u00a0was published in 2016. \u201cWray is all over the place \u2026 What to expect of his next book? Something not much like his last.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

To some of us, however, Wray\u2019s shape-shifting is a source of fascination.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wray\u2019s fifth novel,\u00a0<\/em>Godsend,\u00a0is forthcoming this month from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It tells the story of eighteen-year-old Aden Sawyer\u2019s journey from the suburban California of her childhood to a Pakistani Koran school, and from there across the mountains into Afghanistan, a place\u2014for a teenage American girl ignorant of the culture\u2019s tribal code\u2014of dreadful, mortal danger. It is derived, to a degree, from the true story of John Walker Lindh, the young man who became infamous in the weeks after the attacks of September 11 as the \u201cAmerican Taliban.\u201d But it owes just as much to a story Wray heard while traveling as a journalist in Afghanistan, about a girl of British background who fought there among the mujahideen, disguised as a man.<\/em><\/p>\n

I visited Wray in September, at a peculiar collective house in Brooklyn that he shares with the writers Alice Sola Kim, Isaac Fitzgerald, and Akhil Sharma, and in which Nathan Englander and Marlon James have writing spaces. We sat in creaking teakwood chairs in the cluttered kitchen, and ate slightly overcooked spaghetti, for which he apologized profusely.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The last time we spoke, two years ago, about what we were both working on, you had just begun researching this new book, but in a very casual way. You had said you were interested in the figure of a person that becomes radicalized, especially when their social context is not one that necessarily fosters this kind of change of consciousness.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

\u00a0That\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

But it seemed that you were involved in a very casual investigation. And then, maybe a year and a half later, we spoke over the phone\u2014I remember I was walking down Broadway, and you were in Mexico City\u2014and,\u00a0after talking about myself for way too long, I asked you, How are you doing, John Wray? And you said, I\u2019ve just finished my book!<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

Yeah.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

This was a different process for you than with your earlier novels. How did it go from being an idea that you had to being a finished book?<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

This time around was really unlike the other books that I\u2019ve tried to write. I didn\u2019t have much of a plan, I think, until I actually traveled to Afghanistan\u2014on the trail of a completely different story. There was a time when I thought I was going to write a nonfiction book about this kid, John Walker Lindh, who eventually became known across the world as the American Taliban. His story is fascinating, of course, and deserves a great nonfiction book. Have I really never told you this story?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

I was traveling around the country, trying to find people who had known John Walker Lindh before September 11. He was quite well known even back then, among certain groups.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Not American groups.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

Not American groups, no. Mostly Pashtuns, in and around Kabul, but also across the country. When he became famous in the United States and Europe as the American Taliban, Lindh was also becoming very well known in Afghanistan, where there were very different sympathies and interpretations of the choices he had made.<\/p>\n

So I was traveling around Afghanistan, trying to find people who had known this young American, barely twenty, who attracted notice wherever he went because he was the only American involved with the Taliban army. Finally, in a small town north of Kabul, I met an old man, who was sitting on a sun-warmed wall on the outskirts of town. Noor, the wonderful person who was taking me around the country, keeping me safe and interpreting for me, started talking with the old man. We asked him, Did you know the American boy who was involved with the army at that time? And he said, Yes, I heard about him\u2014and I also heard about the girl. There was a long pause, and Noor said, Oh, you mean the boy, and the man said, No no no. I mean the girl.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The girl.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

That was a real turning point. I got chills down my back immediately. Because the idea of a girl being involved in that conflict, in any capacity\u2014<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

She was, what? Nineteen or so?<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

Well, that\u2019s just it. I spent the rest of my time in Afghanistan trying to find out further details about her\u2014whether she was real, or whether this was simply some kind of legend that had sprung up. I started to piece together a clumsy tapestry of facts and hearsay, but it was one of those times when I\u2019ve been grateful to be a novelist\u2014<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

And not a reporter!<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

And not a reporter. Because at some point I realized that the gaps in what I knew were actually an advantage.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Absolutely.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

Those were where a novel could begin. From then on, it went very quickly. That\u2019s why so much happened between those two conversations that you mentioned. It took me about a year and a half to write.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

At what point, exactly, did you decide that this would be fiction and not nonfiction?<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

I decided this would be a novel at precisely the point at which I couldn\u2019t make any further progress\u2014<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In your investigation.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

Right. The girl appeared, and I was able to follow that trail for a certain amount of time, like a detective. Until I realized I was a terrible detective.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Fiction writers are just lazy. We\u2019re not going to do our homework! We\u2019re just going to make it up.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

Right.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to research what chlorophyll is, or how photosynthesis works. I\u2019m just going to imagine it.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s such a liberating moment, when you decide to make it up.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a reckoning with your personality.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the moment when you stop asking yourself whether what you\u2019re doing as a fiction writer is central to the culture, whether it\u2019s been rendered pass\u00e9 by video games\u2014<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Will Self is right, at least about a few things. We\u2019re easel painters.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

But what could be more beautiful than painting on an easel?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I also think it\u2019s valuable! But I don\u2019t know how we justify it.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

But to answer your question, Afghanistan is a very difficult place to play detective. It\u2019s a dangerous place to play detective. I had very little confidence that\u2014even with the invaluable help of Noor\u2014we were ever going to get to the true story. I also began to wonder, the more people we spoke to, whether it might in fact be a legend that had sprung up to address some way that people were feeling about the conflict.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

That\u2019s such a fiction writer\u2019s point of view! But I understand the speculation. What was it in the figure of that young man, or, later, that young woman, that ultimately interested you? What were you getting to, with this investigation of their motives, or their American soul\u2014whatever that may be? That\u2019s one thing I know well about you\u2014that when you write, you\u2019re asking questions, not answering questions.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

As soon as you try to answer questions in fiction, you\u2019re screwed.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Exactly. That\u2019s what dating apps are for.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

I never thought of dating apps in that light!<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Dating apps, Instagram. All social media.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

You\u2019re right\u2014millions of people providing simple answers to complex questions. Which is why social media is fascist.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The tyranny of the many. Anyway, I imagine you didn\u2019t have a set of answers to give, but a set of questions to ask about why these two young Americans would get involved in something like a war in a faraway country. What were those questions?<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

What particularly interested me about John Walker Lindh was the fact that he traveled from Mill Valley, California, to another part of the world to take up his jihad\u2014which is actually just Arabic for struggle<\/em>, and can mean a spiritual quest, something very private and internal, or, at the other end of the spectrum, taking up arms, specifically in defense of Muslim territory\u2014<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a widely mistranslated word, jihad.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

It\u2019s deeply misunderstood. In any case, many young men have left Europe and the U.S. and traveled to the Middle East to take part in various militant movements, but the vast majority of them have come from Muslim backgrounds. What interested me about Lindh was that he came from a very conventional Christian family\u2014<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Protestant Christian.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

A Protestant family, that\u2019s right. In the novel, the father of my protagonist, who\u2019s from the same part of California that Lindh was from, is an Islamic studies professor. But Lindh himself had no such connection. He actually became interested in Islam through Spike Lee\u2019s film about Malcolm X.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Wow.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

And then through listening to a lot of nineties hip-hop.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

So, he was a white American who, through African American culture and Malcolm X, became Muslim American\u2014<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

\u2014and the history of Islam.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you think this is an emotional and intellectual process that other white American boys can follow? What is it that makes such a path possible?<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

I think Lindh\u2019s progression from introverted, suburban\u00a0California, Waspy kid to militant is actually not that different from what a lot of American teenagers go through. It begins for a lot of kids\u2014particularly more intelligent, more sensitive kids\u2014in their early teens, when they start to understand that the society they\u2019re a part of is unjust. This causes them to question a lot of things that teenagers all over the world question\u2014their parents\u2019 choices, the culture they come from. I think a lot of white kids, especially boys, become interested in hip-hop as a way of identifying with people who have every right to be indignant and angry\u2014more right, in fact, than they themselves might have.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

But where do you draw the line? I was in Stockholm three weeks ago. I was super jet-lagged, and so I went up to see what the hotel bar was like\u2014I was expecting to find a nice, quiet place where I could read my book and have a glass of wine. What I found was this horrid, Dante-esque limbo of Swedish eighteen year olds twerking to American hip-hop in a very\u2014well, in Spanish, there\u2019s a very good word for it,\u00a0tronco<\/em>. Like if you\u2019re the trunk of a tree, and you don\u2019t have hips, so you don\u2019t really\u2014<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

You\u2019re not doing much bending.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I\u2019m being a little cruel now. But I arrived at this terraza<\/em>, full of Swedish teenagers twerking, or mock-twerking, and I thought, what is happening here, culturally? Is it about trying to understand a distant culture? It seemed to me that it was just what was in fashion. Where do we draw the line between some unconscious appropriation of trends, causes, motifs, and\u2014I don\u2019t know. Where do you, as a writer, take some sort of critical distance there?<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re writing about kids of that age, you can\u2019t take a critical distance. You have to try to get as close to that point of view as possible. What\u2019s fascinating to me about a bunch of California teens, let\u2019s say, white American Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who are passionately immersed in hip-hop, in black American culture and music\u2014<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Latin American kids, too, no? There is a confluence of white coming toward black, and Latin coming toward black. There\u2019s something there. What is it?<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

Well, I think one thing hip-hop has, that earlier forms of black music appropriated by white people, such as swing, didn\u2019t have to the same degree, is this very direct and open articulation of righteous anger\u2014<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve totally strayed from our topic.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

True. So, you can have a group of kids\u2014they can be your Swedish eighteen year olds on the hotel terrace, they could be John Walker Lindh\u2019s friends in high school\u2014who live their lives to the soundtrack of hip-hop. Most of them don\u2019t think twice about it, most of them don\u2019t pay any attention to the lyrics. But some of those kids, very few of them, will become more profoundly interested in the music they\u2019re listening to. They\u2019ll become students of that music. And John Walker Lindh was one of those kids. He really tried decode what he was listening to. And he became particularly interested in songs and groups that were more ideological.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What groups? What songs?<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

Well\u2014<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I actually don\u2019t want to ask you too many more of these types of questions, the what-happens-backstage questions. They get in the way.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

These are questions that, while I\u2019m writing a novel, I try not to ask myself too many. But I think they\u2019re interesting to talk about now. When you\u2019re writing a book, all you need is the awareness that something is really fascinating you, that you\u2019re engaged by it, and that you want to keep going. You don\u2019t want to accidentally create any interference in that beautifully functioning connection.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when you\u2019re running on intuition. People talk about inspiration, which is lazy\u2014to say, I got up today and I was so inspired. You have an intuition, which is basically a way of saying that you\u2019re trusting your curiosity and that it\u2019s sincere. You know that you feel it, because you wake up and you talk about it with your friends and family, you bore them with it for three hours. That\u2019s when you know that you\u2019re completely submerged in something. Who cares if anybody else cares about it, it\u2019s something that you\u2019ve connected with deeply, something that sits you down for five or six or ten hours a day, for two or three or five years\u2014<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

Or four hours a day, for some of us. Ten hours a day, for five years?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

For me, yeah. But that\u2019s because I\u2019m slow.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

That really is standard procedure for you? Where do you find even five hours in a day, with all that you do?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You know, I was younger then. I was younger until about three months ago.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

You were actually younger until today.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I was younger until I came to this house! I suddenly got so old!<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

I have that effect on people.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

It\u2019s your old German entomologist vibe.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

Old Austrian<\/em> entomologist vibe.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Right! I always make that mistake.<\/p>\n

WRAY<\/p>\n

I think this conversation is over.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Valeria Luiselli is the author of the essay collection\u00a0<\/em>Sidewalks,<\/em>\u00a0the novels\u00a0<\/em>Faces in the Crowd and\u00a0<\/em>The Story of My Teeth,<\/em>\u00a0and, most recently,\u00a0<\/em>Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. She is the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation \u201c5 Under 35\u201d honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in the<\/em> New York Times,\u00a0Granta,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>McSweeney\u2019s,\u00a0among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Knopf will publish her third novel,\u00a0<\/em>Lost Children Archive,<\/em> in\u00a0February 2019. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Valeria Luiselli speaks with John Wray about why white boys love hip-hop, why social media is fascist, and his new book, \u2018Godsend,\u2019 which explores why a young Christian American would go to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1620,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[2522,1627,21637,38601,38604,38605,9798,38602,19790,1347,24411,38603,13781],"class_list":["post-129976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-afghanistan","tag-akhil-sharma","tag-alice-sola-kim","tag-godsend","tag-isaac-fitzgerald","tag-john-walker-lindh","tag-john-wray","tag-lowboy","tag-marlon-james","tag-nathan-englander","tag-taliban","tag-the-right-hand-of-sleep","tag-valeria-luiselli"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBecoming Radicalized: An Interview With John 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